Track 61 was said to have been built in the Thirties for former US president Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR) to be used as a discreet entrance for the hotel in an attempt to keep his polio condition hidden from the public eye. A customised train car and lift (for transfers to the hotel’s garage) were built to accommodate his presidential limousine during his stays at the hotel.

“It was housed there [Track 61] to be protected from the elements,” Grand Central historian Daniel Brucker told Skift last year, “but in 1945, it was being prepped [for a presidential voyage] when FDR suddenly died. It hasn’t moved since.”

Track 61 has previously been used by the US military general John J Pershing in 1938 and was the site of a diesel locomotive exhibition in 1946, and a fashion show in 1948. It is rumoured to still be in use and was said to have served several other US presidents, including George W Bush, who apparently “had a train kept permanently idling on Track 61 in case he had to escape quickly” during a previous stay at the hotel, according to Christopher Winn, author of I Never Knew That About New York.

2. There’s a whispering gallery at Grand Central Station

The world’s largest railway station features an archway just outside the Oyster Bar & Restaurant (one of the city’s oldest restaurants and culinary landmarks known for its incredible seafood and vaulted tiled ceilings) where two people standing at diagonal corners of the arch are able to hear each other perfectly when speaking softly, even in whispers. It is rumoured to be the spot where Charles Mingus, the American jazz legend, proposed to his wife using the unique acoustic feature of the space.

The entrance of the Oyster Bar & Restaurant in Grand Central TerminalCredit:
Getty

3. Coney Island’s beach was named after Brighton

With a similar history, topography and southern location, Coney Island’s historical roots can be traced back to the famed English seaside resort.

New York was taken over by the English from around the 1660s and Coney Island started to become a holiday destination around the 1830s and 1840s, after a bridge was built that connected it to the main part of New York. Quicker transport times, made possible via steamship services and more carriage roads, soon made Coney Island a popular holiday spot for the residents of Manhattan, Brooklyn and other New York boroughs. This led to the building of the coastal resort area of Brighton Beach in 1878, named after Brighton in England, which around the same time was also becoming a popular day-trip destination for Londoners after the arrival of the London and Brighton Railways service in 1841.

The beach at Coney Island in 1928Credit:
Getty

Similar to England’s Brighton resort, Coney Island was also home to a grand hotel (Hotel Brighton) visited by mostly the upper middle class at the time, as well as a pavilion (the 400 ft-tall Brighton Beach Pavilion) - an homage to Brighton’s Royal Pavilion built back in 1783 - and of course a boardwalk and beach pier comparable to Brighton’s.

Coney Island today continues to serve the city as a seaside resort and amusement park offering more than 50 rides and attractions, including its newest - the Ford Amphitheater, a 5,000-seat open-air concert venue set on Coney Island’s boardwalk which opened last summer, with inaugural gigs from the singer Sting and other artists.

The Wonder Wheel at Coney Island, one of the country's national landmarksCredit:
AP

4. It was the Hollywood of the East

The heart of the American film industry was based on the east coast of the country before the birth of Hollywood in the early Thirties. Major cinema companies, including Paramount Pictures (the second oldest surviving film studio in the country and fifth oldest in the world), based their operations in New York, where several films, such as the first Sherlock Holmes sound film (The Return of Sherlock Holmes), were shot at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens. The historic studio, built in 1920, was declared a national historic district in 1978 and was where other major Hollywood films, including Goodfellas and Carlito’s Way, and several classic American television programmes, including Sesame Street and The Cosby Show, were later shot.

Kaufman Astoria Studios sits adjacent to the fascinating Museum of the Moving Image, the only museum in the country dedicated to exploring the art, history and technology of the moving image, with a collection of more than 130,000 quirky artefacts tracing the history of the film and television industry. One of the museum’s latest projects is Jim Henson’s World, a new monthly screening series showcasing the work of the American director best known as the creator of The Muppets characters. The museum will unveil a new permanent gallery devoted to his works later this month. And New York City’s Central Park has been featured in more films (more than 300) than any other location in the world since 1908 when the first film shot in the park was Romeo and Juliet.

A screening at The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, QueensCredit:
The Museum of the Moving Image/Facebook

5. The best 360-degree view of the city is from...

...Governors Island, the birthplace of New York. Last year’s opening of The Hills, one of New York City’s newest landmarks, has breathed new life into this former military base. The new 10-acre public park is made of four hills that pay homage to the hilly landscapes of pre-colonial Manhattan, including Outlook Hill from where visitors can enjoy the best vistas of Manhattan and Brooklyn, as well as the best 360-degree panoramas of New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn and Jersey City in the distance.

The newly designed park is also home to the longest slide in the city at Slide Hill, while Discovery Hill houses a sculptural work by British artist Rachel Whiteread - said to be her first major permanent public commission in the US. The Hills are open through October.

Thousands of animal species are found in the city’s parks including in Staten Island which hosts a diverse selection of wildlife from hundreds of bird species to white-tailed deers, cotton-tailed rabbits and snapping turtles, one of the world’s largest freshwater turtles.

New York City is home to the world's highest concentration of peregrine falconsCredit:
Steve Oehlenschlager - Fotolia

Other animals to be spotted include coyotes in the Bronx, opossums (North America’s only marsupial), striped skunks (said to prefer the parks of northern Manhattan) and baby bats, the most common species of bats in New York.

7. It will be home to one of the world’s tallest Ferris wheels

The 630ft-tall New York Wheel set in Staten Island will be the world’s second tallest Ferris wheel when it’s completed, surpassed by the planned 689ft-high Ain Dubai wheel, which is said to be more than halfway complete. Expected to be built by 2018, the New York Wheel promises to be one of the city’s greatest landmarks and offer some of the best vistas of the New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, and the New York skyline.

8. It houses the world’s first underground park

Following the success of the city’s hugely popular High Line, an elevated public park built on an abandoned freight railway line on Manhattan’s West Side, earlier this year the city introduced The Lowline, currently set in a preliminary space for what will be the world’s first underground park when it is completed, hopefully by 2021.

The Lowline will be the world's first underground park

The Lowline is an all natural green space that aims to breathe new life into a disused trolley terminal dating back to 1908. Using innovative solar technology designed by James Ramsey of the New York-based Raad Studio, sunlight will be transmitted throughout the park via a reflective surface underground. Set in the 1.5-acre space of the Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal, below Delancey Street, in the heart of Manhattan's Lower East Side, the Lowline is located in "one of the least green areas" of the city but hopes to be a "bright new spot" for the area.

A rendering of New York's future Lowline park

9. It is has the biggest Chinatown in the West

The first Chinese immigrants arrived in Manhattan’s Chinatown in the 1800s when it was part of the former Five Points neighbourhood, which came to be known as one of New York’s worst slum areas, plagued by crime, disease and a red light district known as the Mulberry Bend. The first person to have highlighted the devastating conditions of this part of New York was English author Charles Dickens in his travelogue titled American Notes, which prompted several upper and middle class New Yorkers to visit the area to glimpse the incredible scene for themselves.

A street in Chinatown, ManhattanCredit:
Alamy

Today, housing nearly 150,000 Chinese residents across a two square-mile plot of land, Manhattan’s Chinatown is home to the largest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere. It is one among the 12 Chinatowns spread across the New York metropolitan area (including in the neighbouring ‘Tri-state’ area of New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania) which forms the highest population of Chinese people outside of Asia, with nearly 812, 410 Chinese residents (nearly 574, 900 in the five boroughs of New York City alone, making New York’s Chinatown the largest in America) as of last year. Most of New York’s Chinese population resides in the borough of Queens, where Flushing is home to one of fastest growing and largest Chinese communities outside of Asia.

10. There is a ‘Little Britain’

While many cities around the world might have a Chinatown or two, a Little Italy, and perhaps a Little Greece, New York City may be the first to have a ‘Little Britain’ (unofficial, at the moment). A cluster of small shops around Greenwich Avenue in the trendy West Village neighbourhood of Manhattan have become a favourite haunt among Anglophiles and British expats alike.

One of the street’s most popular venues is Tea & Sympathy, a tiny bolthole of a cafe themed after a traditional English tea room which has been graced by the likes of various British celebrities for years since, from David Bowie, Joanna Lumley and Rupert Everett to Joss Stone, Jools Holland and Kate Moss, who is reported to have been visiting the cafe for nearly 17 years. Visitors can enjoy some of Britain's classic comforts foods with a menu offering everything from bangers n' mash, Welsh rarebit, and Yorkshire pudding to treacle pudding and rhubarb crumble, and of course traditional afternoon tea served with scones and clotted cream.

Other UK-themed venues nearby include the fish and chip shop A Salt and Battery as well as Myers of Keswick, owned by Peter Myers from Keswick, England, where you can take your pick of all-things-English, from McVities biscuits to Walker’s crisps.

A photo posted by Myers of Keswick (@myersofkeswick) on Nov 29, 2014 at 8:29am PST

The area has yet to receive the official stamp of approval from the city as “Little Britain” following an official campaign for its recognition, backed by various celebrities including Sir Richard Branson and London born American actress Mischa Barton, in 2007.

11. There's a waterfall in Central Park

Tucked away in the North Woods - a 40-acre woodland part of Central Park - drowning out the rush and noise of the city, is the quiet calm of The Ravine (pictured below). Forming the park’s only stream valley, its waterfall is created by a loch that’s dammed in several places to create the cascades. The area was intended by the park’s designers to resemble the wilderness of the Adirondack Mountains of rural upstate New York.

12. It housed the first ever hospital in the US

The island forming part of the city’s historic Statue of Liberty attraction (which is set on nearby Liberty Island) is also home to an abandoned hospital (pictured below), which dates from 1902 and once served as a detention facility for immigrants arriving on the island who were considered to be too ill and physically unfit to enter the country. The complex was the first public hospital to open in the US and the largest at the time. It functioned as a hospital until 1930 before it was abandoned in 1954. Its main building was restored and opened as a museum in 1990, while the unrestored parts of the complex were opened to the public for hard-hat tours from October 2014.

13. You can go surfing in the city

Beyond the much-loved Coney Island, the Big Apple offers a host of sandy beaches just a short metro or car journey from the heart of the city in Queens and Brooklyn, including Rockaway Beach (pictured below) and Long Beach - New York’s only two surfing beaches.

The coastal resort area of Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, pictured below, is a popular spot for locals. Offering plenty of specialty restaurants and shops offering vodka, black bread, dumplings and jams, the beach is known as “Little Odessa” for its Ukrainian feel.